Business Insights Inner

Business Insights

Agile

by Karen Senior

21 February

How agile is your team?

I recently attended an ‘Agile for Executives’ workshop with one of our clients and, after more than 20 years of working within the creative, branding, marketing and UX fields, the organisational attributes of the agile methodology and incorporated design thinking sheds all predetermined ideas of ‘the ways things should be done’.

Agile is a project management methodology (commonly used in IT software development) that uses short development cycles called sprints to focus on continuous improvement in the development of a product or service.

Why are marketers such late adopters to this brilliant methodology? Agile makes sense and follows the incremental stages of initiate, design, develop, evaluate, adjust, revise and when full acceptance is achieved: deploy.

No more traditional, pre-orchestrated ways of working; it adopts a collaborative, organisation-wide way of generating ideas and problem solving. There is no rigid structure, it is 100% kinetic and prompts constructive criticism and productive solution development during the process – you don’t wait for completion before providing feedback.

No more working in silos or adhering to hierarchy or following a rigid plan. Agile demands absolute collaboration and is 100% customer focused.

This way of working isn’t for sissies: it requires quick responses, deep dive attitudes and absolute commitment, while encouraging an environment where you want to work. But at the end of each sprint you no longer resent the scrum master and begin to appreciate the process of customer discovery that agile will deliver.

What this does is encourage thinking on your feet and pitching the first idea that comes to mind, which is often the best one. Workflows are organised in sprints and you work together from conception to completion. This teaches you to listen to others, to appreciate the value of working as a team and being completely reliant upon the valuable expertise that your agile team brings - which is something we should all be doing more of.

Partnered with solid marketing plan, using Agile methodology could result in impactful change - at a fast pace!